Absalom was born of Amy Mae, fifth of June, and for work drives his late father’s side-by-side around the farm to scare away crows. He’s got a hacksaw voice that the birds respond to, and little motivation to pursue education or real work. He tried working in Putnam with Jones last summer, but the boss said he worked too slow. Plus, out here he can pull the side-by-side near the water and throw rocks into the algae whenever he wants.

The casket is underneath the mulberry tree still. Absalom circles the great rooty tree to keep the crows away. He’s ran the dirt so deep that a nice grooved-up circle wraps itself around the perimeter. It looks like some pagan sign. Absalom stops in front of the casket, just where the shade starts, his tires edging that strange circle. Cicadas screech. Their little shells are latched to the bark of the tree, a thousand brown skeletons climbing up from the roots and into the leaves.

They’d all climbed out of the ground a couple weeks ago, screamed and screamed, then left their bodies around wherever they pleased. Three nights ago, Absalom had left the bathroom window cracked because the air was sweet and the tub still smelt of Baby Layla’s soap. He’d gone to the bathroom in the morning and all their brown shells were inside the tub and toilet, latched onto his towel, and the shower curtain. He collected them into a pile and dumped them out the window then shut the window tight. Stinking bodies stinking up the house.

Amy Mae was a slight woman. Mimi had called her Birdy, her bones so frail she’d say she could snap them like little bird bones. Amy Mae had thin, stiff hips that didn’t let up when she walked, so she took her whole body with her with each step, but she hacked wood for the fire with a deft hand and skinned rabbits on Sundays.

It was her hands that didn’t belong to her. Everything else about Amy Mae was complete except her hands. “Why, that’s Birdy,” said Mrs. Lisa Lynn, upon seeing Amy Mae’s feet descend the stairs. But cover Amy Mae in a blanket and pull out her hands, it’s a stranger — some burly man with hairy knuckles and knife scars.

She had ten fingers and seven fingernails — two lost from horse wound. She had tried to get a stone out from a horseshoe and got the beast mad. It had stomped out the two last nails on her left hand. They turned black and flicked right off. Absalom had never rode a horse before; He didn’t like things that made the air too fast so that he couldn’t breathe, like horses, or boats at full speed. He used to be fine with boats and such until Jones put him in a sleeping sack and pushed him down the stairs, then forgot about him and left him in the sack all the hot afternoon so he struggled to breathe. The third nail was his fault but Amy Mae won’t ever say so.

Absalom jiggles the fingernails in his pocket. This the whole point he came out for. He’s never been in a casket before. Even while he’d fixed the pine boards together, he kept shivering, thinking about putting Amy Mae inside for good.

A drippy layer of yellow pollen melts off the top of the pine box. The air is thick with screaming cicadas and swollen heat. Absalom moans, shaking the crowbar like he doesn’t even want to be holding it. The house looks so far from the mulberry tree. Bleached so white from the sun nobody’d know it’s supposed to be blue. The twin porch chairs creak. One of them still has the sleeping sack draped over it like a snake skin, sun-bleached and stiff. He’d burn it sometime.

Absalom holds the fingernails in his pocket, creeping up to the side of the casket. It’s smaller than the length of the side-by-side. It looks like a little child’s casket. Jones offered to make it for him; He cuts trees out by Putnam and said he had a thick pile of cherry oak he could fashion up into something respectable. But Absalom could do it on his own, that was the whole point. And anyway, he was bigger than Cousin Jones now, but Jones still acted like he was the grown one.

Amy Mae didn’t need much wood, anyhow. It was lucky she was so small. It didn’t take but a few splinters of pine to cover her up. She wasn’t even big enough to reach the eggs on the top shelf in the coop. She’d gotta climb into the second shelf like she was planning on nestling in with the chickens, reach up with her hairy man-hands and thieve the hard-earned eggs. She was a fox, small and bushy, her hair puffing out around her head in dark frizzy curls. She was a fox except for her hands. They were bear-hands. Fighting hands. Not good for thieving, you see. Too fast to break things. She had a sly mouth but not sly hands. “I tell you, Lisa Lynn. I never seen that pattern of dress before, but it’s sure different-looking.” Amy Mae’s hands didn’t slink around the way her mouth does. Her hands could pull apart a nice ribeye clean in half. Well, Amy Mae hadn’t even quite come up to Absalom’s chest, so when he set out to make her casket, it didn’t take him but two afternoons.

He found her nails on the windowsill of the bathroom when he was dumping out empty cicada shells. He thought at first they were three fat glossy beetles, but then he figured out quick what they were. He paced the bathroom back and forth, tracking a circle in the bathroom rug. He shook out his hands, reached for the nails, pulled back, reached again.

“Aw damn. Aw damn,” he moaned. He clutched his stomach like he had an ulcer. He never had an ulcer before, but he seen Pa grab at his stomach just the same, crying out: Ulcer! Ulcer! And just then, Absalom felt a pain in his stomach unlike nothing else.

How’d they even get there, sitting up on the bathroom sink like three black eyes? Amy Mae wasn’t the sentimental kind to keep them, her dead fingernails, but here they were, staring up unblinking with their purple-black, hateful gazes. Absalom swept the nails into his palm and shoved them in his jean pocket.

He taps the lid of the casket. Always knock before entering someone’s house, Amy Mae had told him over and over. He had a habit when he was young of walking up to Mrs. Lisa Lynn’s house, opening the creaky screen door, and letting himself in. It wasn’t no issue till he walked in on Lisa Lynn in her untied nightrobe and he got a terrifying look at her hanging breasts and dark hole for a belly button.

“Lord, Amy Mae,” Lisa Lynn hushed one summer after such an incident. She and Amy Mae sipped cokes on the porch. Absalom laid on his stomach in front of the screen door. The wood stayed cold in the shade of the house and usually a little breeze came through. “He sure runs you.”

The fat of his cheek was pressed to the wood. He kicked his feet rhythmically against the floor and counted the swirls in the grain. Jones was upstairs with his hand down his pants.

“I think he’s sick.”

“Bless him.” Lisa Lynn took a long drag from her cigarette, holding it in her mouth before tilting her head back and letting out all the steam from her body.

They sucked up their cokes, sighing and swatting away the gnats. Lisa Lynn was a kind Christian woman who came to the farm to tell Amy Mae about the new corner store on Mancore and when Mrs. Brandy became widowed. Lisa Lynn put out her cigarette on the arm of her chair and dropped the butt into an empty coke bottle near her ankle. The bottle was full of black cigarettes and ash. Lisa Lynn rooted around her tin cigarette holder and lit another. The cigarette crackled as she sucked in.

“It’s just not right,” Amy Mae said, creaking back in the rotted porch chair. “He can’t bathe himself without wondering what the dirt-water tastes like.”

“You did have a smoke that one time early on.”

“Well hell, Lisa. You know his head was three times the normal size. They say they don’t know how I survived. He was so big they asked the minister to come and pray over me. All that head and there ain’t nothing in it.”

“Bless him.”

“I can’t leave him alone. You might as well put me in a box and leave me there. It’ll feel just the same.”

The day before this conversation, Amy Mae had asked him to go to the corner store to get her a pack of gum, but Absalom lost his way. He got distracted by those richy school boys playing ball at the park and he done forgot all about the gum. Took him just about half the evening to remember he had a home and bed to get back to.

The women sipped their cokes and sighed.

Absalom taps the casket. Tap tap tap. Lisa Lynn’s a kind woman, even though it was all her fault. She did Amy Mae’s laundry for the whole summer after Baby Layla died from heat stroke. She wasn’t no real baby. She was five. Amy Mae just called her Baby Layla like it was her full name.

The casket is boarded up. Absalom hikes up the crowbar and shoves it between the lid and the body of the casket. He wrenches them apart. The lid gives way easily. He didn’t have it in him to test God’s will.

It’s a stench like nothing else — eggy sulfur, and the furled, stagnant smell of algae. Absalom tried not to make a face; He just knew Amy Mae would have something to say about being respectful of the dead and their hardships. Well she only been dead three days and the heat did something nasty to her, and he couldn’t help but bring his shirt up to his nose and gag.

A handful of summers ago, this same time of year, he and Jones went out in the woods past Lisa Lynn’s pasture near the water and came upon a big lump. Jones threw his hands to his head and as Absalom came closer, he saw what it was: one of Lisa Lynn’s cows, laid belly up at the shore of the algae water. She was so bloated her belly stretched pink. Her neck was broke, eyes white with maggots. Dogs or buzzards had taken some chunks from her neck. Her tongue was a purple lump rolled over beside her head. Jones pulled his shirt over his nose, his eyes watering.

The cow must have been dead a few days. The heat was wretched, too. Only summer hotter was this last summer Baby Layla died.

“God, we gotta go tell my mom. This her favorite cow.”

Lisa Lynn and Mr. Cedric, her husband, came back with shovels.

“Get away, Absalom,” Mr. Cedric said, creeping up next to the cow cautious, tiptoeing over the leaves like they were triggers for a bomb. “In heat like this, a cow can explode. You want guts and shit all over you?”

Jones and some guys of Mr. Ced’s spent all afternoon digging up a grave deep enough to put the cow in. Lisa Lynn was in a fit, crying about her favorite cow. Well, they buried the cow careful so as not to get guts-and-shit all over them. Absalom didn’t stay to watch. His stomach couldn’t handle the smell. He cried fat gator tears, gasping and clutching his chest. It was too hot to breathe. The air was heavy, heavy and bloated like that cow.

Amy Mae came down and grabbed him. They walked together silent while Absalom cried over Lisa Lynn’s cow.

“It’s just a cow,” Amy Mae said, pulling branches straight off the trees with her man-hands.

“The only thing sad about it is we didn’t get to eat her.”

She’d always been cold, Amy Mae, up until the very day she died. Thinking about it now, he’d never seen her cry until this early summer when Baby Layla was dead on the porch and he never saw her cry after.

“You just like your daddy. Can’t do nothing but cry.”

As they tramped through the woods, he mushed his lips together, trying to come up with something smart. He wanted to spit she was a cold woman, heartless. Evil. How could she not cry for the cow? The poor beast tripped and broke its neck, and just like that it’s existing so as not to explode.

“You a heartless cunt.”

Amy Mae was so fast with her bear-hands that Absalom was on the ground, dirt down his throat, before he even knew she swung. He didn’t know how she’d reached so far up to even square him, but it was the quickest she’s ever moved.

She spit on his face, her nose twisted up like she could still smell that dead cow. “And you ain’t nothing but a damn cicada. You scream and scream, then you’ll die and leave your skin for someone else to take care of. I hope it ain’t me.” Then she stood up on her thin bird legs and walked back to the house.

He wiped clay from his face. He shouldn’t have called her heartless. That was mean and God don’t like mean people.

Absalom shuts his eyes when the lid of the casket falls away. He thinks about the bloated cow with its thick purple tongue licking up the grass. He thinks about Baby Layla, zipped up in a sleeping sack on the porch. He thinks about the algae water so hard he can see it right in front of him. It ain’t true anyway, about her heart. The day Baby Layla died, Amy Mae was gasping and clutching her chest as all hell like she was having some sort of attack, so there must be something there.

He jiggles the nails in his palm like a couple of dice. He feels that tightening in his chest, that thick wad of tissue in the middle of his throat constricting. He doesn’t want to see her, he really doesn’t. He couldn’t bear to look at Lisa Lynn’s cow, and that was just a cow. The frizzy strands of her dark hair blow out the casket. They look like thin wet branches of a hairless cattail jutting up from the algae water.

Baby Layla had beautiful gold hair; Amy Mae said she was an angel, an angel that God gave her just for her to look at. She had long gold hair that curled at the ends, and pink rosebud lips, and long dark lashes. She had dainty hands and thin wrists. Whenever Baby Layla was first born, Amy Mae would sit on the porch with the baby in her lap and kiss her soft knuckles.

“Absalom, ain’t she something special,” she cooed.

“She just a baby.”

“She’s the most perfect thing I ever seen. Look at her hands, they just as big as my one nail.”

Absalom gives Amy Mae her one nail. He drops it careful on the center of her chest where her heart was supposed to be.

It was Baby Layla’s hair that made all this happen, but Absalom didn’t tell Amy Mae about that. He didn’t tell her nothing about any of it.

“Just get in Baby Layla. Imma zip you up and push you down the stairs and it’ll be fun. It’ll be like sledding. You ever been sledding?”

Baby Layla shook her golden head, her cheeks pink from the drafty heat.

“Well neither have I, but Jones says it’s fun.”

Baby Layla tucked herself into the sleeping sack. Absalom zipped her up and pulled her by her feet to the edge of the top step. He walked back to her head and put his hands on her thin shoulders. She had the smallest bones. Not like Absalom’s Mama-killer head.

“You ready, Baby Layla?”

She muffled a response.

Absalom made sure she wouldn’t slide no further than the first couple of steps. She’d start to panic if she slid too far. He pushed and Baby Layla thunked down the steps, one one one, all the way to the bottom.

Absalom raced down after her and went for the zipper, but a whole chunk of Baby Layla’s hair was stuck.

“Your hair stuck, girl.”

“Out!”

Absalom’s hands started shaking. He yanked on the zipper but she shrieked, talking about pulling her hair and Sunday church tomorrow.

Amy Mae kept her shears on the porch, that way she could cut down the bushes while Lisa Lynn sipped her coke. Amy Mae didn’t like the shears leaving the porch; She worried about Baby Layla trying to cut her hair with them. Absalom dragged Baby Layla out to the porch and laid her down. The wood burned the bottom of his feet raw. The shears weren’t on the steps, not by the chairs, not in the bushes. Maybe they were out by the mulberry tree where Amy Mae sometimes sits. Absalom took the side-by-side to the mulberry tree. He circled around, parked it, walked up to the roots. The crows were hawing again, perched up on their branches, blinking black eyes at him.

“Go now,” he said in his hacksaw voice.

He drove the side-by-side around the tree and they scuttled off. He followed them through the farm, right at the edge of Lisa Lynn’s pasture. The cows were grazing, their tails swatting away flies. The air stunk of hot dung. Absalom wiped his forehead with his shirt. The cows were breathing heavy, snot dripping from their noses, their chests heaving with the molted air.

“Absalom,” Lisa Lynn called from her parched stoop. “Drive out by the trees and get me some wood.”

“Wood?”

“Boy, you know what I said.”

Absalom drove into the trees to get some wood for Lisa Lynn. He passed by the water where the algae grew thick. He threw rocks in the algae. He wished he could drink the water. He thought about cupping the goop in his hand and slurping it down. He dropped the wood back to Lisa Lynn.

“I need to burn those old porch chairs. Ced’s making new ones.”

“I gotcha.”

Lisa Lynn was fanning her face. Sweat mucked the neckline of her shirt. “How’s your Mama?”

“She good.”

“Baby Layla?”

That’s when Absalom heard the screaming. It was the roar of a thousand cicadas. A thousand thousand screeches rising up through the trees, bloating up above the tallest branches, and then dying.

Absalom and Lisa Lynn drove back on the side-by-side. Amy Mae was splayed on her knees, Baby Layla laid in her lap. The sleeping sack was ripped open straight down the middle, like some bear had gotten its massive paws in it. Amy Mae’s mouth was hung open but no sound came out. She just clawed at Baby Layla’s chest like she might rip the baby’s skin open and crawl inside and keep her alive with her own living body.

“My baby, my baby,” she burbled. Absalom had never seen Amy Mae cry before. It was a deep sound from the gut. It didn’t fit her body, it was something more like her big man-hands.

“My god, my god,” Lisa Lynn cried, gripping Baby Layla’s feet.

Absalom shook his head. He couldn’t look at her. It made his stomach curl, he couldn’t stand it. He took a step back. The wood creaked and it was like a gun went off next to Amy Mae’s head.

“God sees you, Absalom. God sees you and he don’t want you. I’ll kill myself. You hear me? I’ll kill myself. That way I can meet you next to God and tell him all you did, and he’ll send you somewhere worse than life.”

Absalom cried big fat gator tears. He sobbed, his face wet and hot. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Mama. I went looking for shears.”

“Aw god,” Amy Mae cried, going back to her baby. “There was no point. There was no point.”

Absalom glances out the tail of his eye at Amy Mae’s bloated face and looks away. He doesn’t blame Amy Mae for going; There was a reason his sister was Baby Layla and he was just Absalom. He gives Amy Mae her last two nails, lines them up in a neat row of three across her chest. He wants her to be whole, even with her hands. It won’t matter to God, but it’ll look nice for her to get to him whole is all.

 

Image by Bruno Cervera on pexels.com, licensed under CC 2.0.